Just a few days after Mono got ported to SkyOS, SkyOS now has support for System.Windows.Forms. A screenshot of the first C# application using System.Windows.Forms developed in and for SkyOS is available at the SkyOS website. Support is not complete yet, obviously.

Adding functionality to *ANY* alternative OS is a good thing, regardless of whether it's open or closed.

I love the open source model, but I don't believe it should be the ABSOLUTE benchmark of a project's value or worth. True freedom in software entails not only a user's right to choose his/her environment, but also the right of a developer to choose which paradigm and/or license best suits their needs and wants.

Growth in any alternative OS is beneficial, as more complete feature sets make those OS's marketable to larger audiences. Marketability can lead to adoption, and adoption leads to diversification in global OS ecologies.......which is both FANTASTIC and DESIRED.

...lying around somewhere. I should try installing it on my son's IBM. It never worked on my home-grown PC.

Supposedly since I paid for the beta copy (twice actually because I could not remember my password to their forums) I should receive the V1.0 copy. Unfortunately I've moved across the country since then so they will not have my new address and I will have to pay for it AGAIN because it has been many months since I've logged onto their forums and I've probably forgotten my password again and lost any paper it was written on in the move.

The screen shot on SkyOS looks better than mono samples on linux! Winforms for Mono on Linux and particularly on Mac is a non-starter for professional work, it is very buggy and the look is terrible particularly on Linux.

Does this mean we'll eventually see some of the Windows Home Digital Recorder type applications ported soon? Personally I'm hoping that SkyOS will be supporting my Hauppauge 878, 848 and 881 WinTV cards soon. I'd imagine given how sweet the previews we've seen in the past are that a SkyOS PVR DVR would run great!

Instead of porting .NET to every other OS, OS developers must create there own clean, easier to use development framework. Developers of other OS's are themselves giving Microsoft chance(s) to dominate on them.

There really is nothing inherently "Microsoft-only" about .NET and the C# language. If you look at the class structure, it matches Java more than it does anything else.

Windows.Forms IS somewhat microsoft-centric, but .NET and Mono do not require this for development. You can just as easily write your software using GTK# and then have all windows users install GTK# in order to use your software. Windows.Forms compatibility on other OSes just makes it easier to write cross-platform software like Java is capable of.

Also, a clarification, this is not a port of .NET - it is a port of Mono - which is a 100% re-implementation of the .NET CLR, c# compiler, and .NET class libraries. That is kinda like saying that GCC is a port of Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler - or open-source Java VM's are a port of Sun's JVM.

"Windows.Forms compatibility on other OSes just makes it easier to write cross-platform software like Java is capable of."

The big problem is that Java's often lampooned for being substandard as far as that goes for GUI applications, and .net is even worse. Windows.forms will make the application look good in windows, bad everywhere else. gtk# will make it look good on linux, so-so on windows, and horrid on osx if it even runs. wx#, never been able to even run at all on any linux distro I've tried it on.

C# had the potential to be 'the' answer to crossplatform development in a reasonably fast language, but, sadly, it's not.

You are calling .net C#, people need to understand there are many languages for .net, C# is just the most common. Boo is probably the best of the languages - the .net platform allows much easier language development. This way you can focus on language usability, features, and syntax niceness, with a fairly fast backend (Boo code is as fast as C#)

There is nothing stopping someone from creating a truely cross platofrm .net gui. I can imagine it being quite nice. XML based, and rather than setting pixel sizes, etc you just create a hierarchy of components. You establish interrelations like this component is on the border of this component, etc. The layout is created based on the target gui/theme. This way it looks right in native guis. Windows support would be easiest - just access System.Windows.Forms.

Or even - if developers are nice enough to separate presentation layers from functionality - each OS could have native .NET bindings for GUI - and developers can write .NET code that directly works with each OS as necessary... of course this is a lot more work for the OS vendor, AND for the developer, but it's a heck of a lot better than having every OS with a completely different development platform as the original poster suggested.

I would say to Robert et al, start migrating your apps over to Mono/WinForms and away from the C code. I'd once seen the file manager code, and it made way too many system calls to shell commands... this is what APIs are for ;-)